Climate change impacts on infrastructure – Committee calls for greater government urgency

• Read the response
• Inquiry: Critical national infrastructure and climate adaptation
• National Security Strategy (Joint Committee)

The report called on the Government to get a ‘proper grip’ on the major national security risks posed by the effects of climate change on critical national infrastructure (CNI). The Chair of the Committee, Dame Margaret Beckett, warned when the report was published that there was a disturbing lack of evidence that anyone in Government was responsible for situations in which climate change was affecting multiple CNI sectors at the same time, creating “cascading crises”.

The Government’s response included input from the Cabinet Office, other government departments (including the new Department for Energy and Net Zero), and bodies such as the Met Office.

It described the Government’s work to capture the linkages between the UK’s most critical infrastructure, to identify and mitigate against risks, including through a ‘CNI Knowledge Base’ tool.

The government’s response to the report is published in full here.

Commenting on the report and the Government’s recent publication of its Resilience Framework, which also deals with CNI, Committee Chair Dame Margaret Beckett said:

“We welcome many aspects of the Government’s response to our report on infrastructure and climate adaptation, including its ongoing work to identify interdependencies between infrastructure sectors, developing work on energy resilience, and improvements to climate prediction and modelling.

“We are also looking forward to engaging with Ministers on the forthcoming National Adaptation Plan, which we understand will address some of our recommendations.

“We are concerned, however, that the Government is not treating this issue with the urgency that it requires. The long-awaited Resilience Framework, published in December, included some positive actions, particularly on local resilience forums and cross-government risk management. The Government is choosing, however, to delay imposing any new resilience regulations on operators of critical national infrastructure until the end of this decade.

“This is akin to organising a fire safety awareness course to respond to a blazing fire.

“Ministers should accelerate this timetable to ensure that our vital infrastructure is properly adapted to the changing climate, and resilient to the more frequent extreme weather events that we are already experiencing, both globally and in the UK.”

Further information

• Inquiry: Critical national infrastructure and climate adaptation
• Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy

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